Let's get real. The real state of our union is that we are in the process of destroying ourselves. We are probably already past the point of no return on climate change. Our addiction to oil has long since become lethal.
Our economic and monetary system is an abject failure. The constant need to grow the economy just to service a choking debt to parasitic bankers is destroying our society and the global ecosystem. Under capitalism we are like locust, devouring everything we touch. Consuming it, poisoning it.
We are running out of oil with absolutely no plan or incentive to replace it. And we are running out of fresh potable water in many regions of the civilized word including large areas of the United States.
Our government has become so captured, so corrupted by un-American, trans-national monied interests that we can't even call ourselves a democracy anymore. The two party system is nothing but a charade of good cop bad cop which has been so effective at keeping the people distracted and divided that the interests these parties represent have been able to carry out an economic war without any resistance at all.
The progressive movement is so weak that it effectively does not exist in the national arena. We've been locked out of the debate over our country's and the world's direction. We are even mocked and ridiculed by those we thought were our allies.
This is catastrophic for our world. Do not buy into the false equivalency of the left and right propagated by the corporate establishment. That narrative goes something like this: There is a right and a left wing, and politics, like a bird, needs both wings to fly. And, of course, their idea of a left winger is Barack Obama.
The truth is there are no wings. There is only enlightened and unenlightened. Right and wrong.
We didn't oppose the disastrous Iraq war because we are hippies, or whatever label they try to put on us. We opposed it because we understand war. We know what it means, and we know what it does.
It is understanding that has kept progressives on the right side of every issue for a century.
Long before it was conventional to care about the environment progressives cared about the environment. Because we are "tree huggers"? No. Because we have the intelligence and wisdom to understand that the environment is an all encompassing system that includes all life, even humans.
We don't fight for living wages and full employment for the people just because we are unemployed and poor. We understand that it is immoral to allow people to suffer and that for society to function, everyone has to prosper.
Progressive ideas aren't perfect. And we disagree among our ranks.
But there is no other political faction in the world that has been more right, more often, on every issue than progressives.
And if we weren't in power through much of the 20th Century, if we hadn't fought for progressive taxation, labor standards, environmental regulations, and civil rights, the world would be an unspeakable place right now.
Think about it. Imagine the world we would live in today if there had never been a New Deal. Never been banking regulations or the Sherman Antitrust Act. Never been the Civil Rights Act, or the Clean Water Act or the National Labor Relations Act.
The world would be a nightmare. Billion would be starving. Drinkable water would be rare and almost impossible to find. The skies would be gray and poisonous. Most of the planet would have been wiped out by total war. And that's only if we had survived that long. For in all probability, we would have already had a nuclear holocaust by now.
This isn't an exaggeration. The lowest elements of humanity, the merchant of greed and death would have created a nightmare without our intervention.
If progressive don't grow a spine soon, and start fighting for what is right, instead of just what we think we can get, the world I just described will be our very near future.
We are in a global state of emergency. Humanity must act quickly, or everything we know and love will be destroyed. Time to grow the f*ck up.